They were happy enough to give it to me, and were just pleased to be rid of this instrument that had hardly ever yielded any interest. Then I set about buying up five or six smaller mortgages with a value of a few thousand marks each, which Sponar had presumably taken out when he was really up against it, in order to keep his head above water from one month to the next and carry on making alabaster lampshades that nobody wanted to buy. Having sorted all this out, I sat at home feeling very pleased, and waited for my landlord to get over his mild attack of bronchitis so that he could come with me to the notary.

Now comes a strange interlude, not without deeper significance, on the eve of Easter, when we planned to organize an Easter egg treasure hunt for our little boy. On Maundy Thursday26 we had a visit from a Mr von Salomon,27 who worked at my publisher’s. Mr von Salomon was not Jewish, as one might assume from his name (and as some people did assume), but came from Rhineland aristocracy. Salomon was a Germanized form of the French ‘Salmon’. He had three brothers, and anything more different than these three brothers it would be hard to imagine. They perfectly exemplified the condition of the German nation: disunited and riven by conflict. One of the brothers was a respectable bank clerk,28 an upright citizen, who was only interested in his own advancement. The second was a committed Communist,29 and if one is to believe his brother, the one I knew (although one certainly shouldn’t believe everything he said!), this brother had been honoured by Stalin in person with a distinguished award. At all events, this Mr von Salomon was soon one of Germany’s ‘most wanted’ men, defying the Nazi terror regime as he travelled constantly back and forth between Paris and Moscow as a courier, wearing a hundred disguises, braving dangers of every kind, and stopping off regularly in Berlin too, where the brothers met up from time to time. The third Salomon brother was a big cheese on the staff of the later notorious Mr Röhm, with whom, however, he did not perish: on the contrary, he rose ever higher through the ranks. He had the – for me – unforgettable first name ‘Pfeffer’. Pfeffer von Salomon – now that’s what I call aristocracy! And my Salomon too, still young as he was, had already had a fairly chequered past. As a young lad he had fought with the Iron Division in the Baltic,30 then he had joined the Consul Organization,31 had taken part in the Ruhr resistance campaign, and finally had been involved somehow in the murder of Rathenau.32 For that he spent some time in prison, where the fiercely nationalist sympathies of the prison staff at the time meant that he was feted as something of a celebrity. He even made a habit of going into town with the prison governor for an evening in the pub, where he found an admiring audience among the bar-room regulars for the tales of his exploits, although it was not unknown for him to get so carried away in the heat of the moment that he mixed up other people’s exploits with his own – for example, telling anecdotes from the Battle of the Marne as if he had been there in person, whereas he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time. When he came out of prison he wrote a couple of books about his experiences; he wrote well and fluently, as long as he stuck to his own adventures. In one of these books, Die Geächteten [The Outcasts],33 he sought to glorify the murder of Rathenau, turning things round somewhat to present the murdered Rathenau as a better kind of man, but with a dark and sinister side to him, while the poor murderers were forced to go on the run in Germany, innocents hunted like wild game. Another book, called Die Stadt [The City],34 is something of a curiosity, a hefty volume, written and printed as a continuous stream of words without any chapter breaks, or even paragraphs, to enliven the tedious uniformity of the text, or give the reader’s eye a chance to rest and pause. Booksellers were quick to dub the book ‘the book with no returns’ – and they were right on both counts: no paragraph breaks, and the book failed to sell, much to the chagrin of my good friend Rowohlt. Mr von Salomon soon discovered, however, that the business of writing books requires a lot of hard work, and often brings in very little money. Like many people who have bright ideas and don’t care for hard work, but do like to live well, he went into films instead. That suited him very well, and when I last saw him on the Kurfürstendamm he had put on a lot of weight, and the acquaintance of a minor writer was clearly a thing of very little importance for a man who was constantly hobnobbing with the film stars of the day. But back then, when he visited me that Maundy Thursday, all this still lay in the future. At that time Mr von Salomon was as lean as a whippet, to which he bore a striking resemblance with his aristocratic, sharp-featured face. I don’t remember any more why he came to see me, he probably just wanted to tell me the latest jokes about Hitler and the Party: back then it was a sort of parlour game – people couldn’t spread the word fast enough! Von Salomon was a funny and talkative man, who knew everybody in the world of literature and art, and the hours passed quickly enough in his company. It would have been a bit wiser, perhaps, to have had this conversation not out in the hall, but in a room where we could have closed the door behind us: but which of us is wise all the time? At that time, certainly, we were anything but. And which of us can always keep in mind that someone downstairs only needs to leave a door ajar in order to hear every word that’s spoken upstairs? The acoustics of a house are unpredictable: sometimes you can hear everything, sometimes nothing at all, and on this Maundy Thursday afternoon someone damned well heard just a little too much!

Now comes interlude Number 2, again not without deeper significance, particularly for the study of the human character. By now it was Good Friday, my wife and I were walking in the garden, while our son tottered gamely along between us on his three-year-old legs. It was still mid-morning, the bell up in the village had just started to ring for the morning service, so it must have been shortly before ten o’clock.